Future
fossil discoveries will not substantially change the picture because
future discoveries cannot nullify the objective evidence already unearthed.
This message is not what we hear from a hundred different voices coming
at us from a dozen different directions. But the human fossils themselves
tell the real story. I can best illustrate the situation by describing
a project I have conducted a number of times in my college apologetics
classes. Each student is to do research on several assigned fossils.
Only fossils that are fully accepted as legitimate by the scientific
community are included.

The rules are as follows:

The student is to spend a minimum of eight hours of research
on each fossil.

He must use only evolutionist sources.

He is to determine the date the evolutionist has assigned to
the fossil.

He is to determine the category (australopithecine, Homo erectus,
Neandertal, etc.) assigned to the fossil by evolutionists.

He is to write a one-page paper outlining his findings and make
copies for distribution to the class.

The paper must contain at least five documented sources.

The results have become quite predictable. After the first week,
a number of students come to me complaining that they cannot find
any agreement among evolutionists regarding the date or the category
of their fossil. I could easily have told them about this situation
in a class lecture, but it wouldn't have had the impact upon them
that their own research provided. Many important hominid fossils are
the subject of intense controversy among evolutionists involving the
date, or the category, or both. The two matters are sometimes related.
For evolutionists, the category to which they assign a fossil is sometimes
used to arbitrarily determine its date, or the date of a fossil is
sometimes used to arbitrarily determine the category to which it is
assigned. This is not an unbiased approach in interpreting human fossils.
I suggest to the students that they go with the two or three evolutionists
out of the five they have consulted who may agree on the fossil in
question.

When I made the fossil assignments, I did not make them randomly.
I purposely gave the more obscure fossils to students who I knew were
good at research. However, after about two weeks, members of this
group began coming to me. They complained that they were not able
to find anything on a particular fossil. Besides using our own college
library, they often checked several of the large state university
libraries in our area. More than one student suggested that there
was no such fossil as the one I had assigned. Laughingly, I was accused
of sending them on a wild-goose chase. Their experience was what I
had anticipated. I wanted them to discover first-hand that there are
many legitimate fossil discoveries about which it is very difficult
to obtain information. When I was satisfied that the student had spent
at least eight hours in searching for information on a particular
fossil, I would give him copies of the materials in my own file on
that fossil so that he could write his report. He could not possibly
duplicate my 25 years of research on the human fossils in the time
allotted. I do not wish to imply that the difficulty in finding material
on many of the human fossils represents some kind of evolutionist
plot. What happens is that only the most sensational fossil discoveries
receive much publicity. Most discoveries are reported in some scientific
journal and then forgotten by all but a very few experts. The fossils
mentioned in most popular presentations of human evolution represent
just a small portion of the total fossil material that has been uncovered.
As the students prepared to write their reports, a third group comes
to me. Because of the conflict they see between the shape (morphology)
of their fossil and the assignment given it by evolutionists, they
have questions.

Question: ‘Why do evolutionists call the very robust
Australian fossils Homo sapiens when they themselves state that they
are almost identical to the Java Homo erectus material?’

Answer: ‘Those robust Australian fossils (the Kow Swamp
material, the Cossack skull, the Willandra Lakes WHL 50 skull, etc.),
by their dating methods, are just thousands of years old. Homo erectus
wasn’t supposed to be living so recently. Hence, the evolutionist
must call them Homo sapiens to preserve his theory.’

Question: ‘Why are the skull KNM-ER 1470, the leg bones
KNM-ER 148 I, and the skull KNM-ER 1590, found by Richard Leakey in
East Africa, assigned to Homo habilis when the skull sizes, skull
shapes, and the very modern leg bones would allow assignment to some
form of Homo sapiens?’

Answer: ‘Those fossils are dated at almost two million
years. The evolutionist cannot allow modern humans to be living in
that evolutionary time frame—no matter what the fossils look
like.’

Question: ‘Why is the elbow bone from Kanapoi, KP 271,
found in East Africa in 1964, called Australopithecus africanus when
the computer analysis conducted by evolutionists declares it to be
virtually identical to modern humans?’

Answer: ‘Because the fossil is dated at 4.4 million years!
It would suggest that true humans are older than their evolu-tionary
ancestors. No evolutionist worth his salt can follow the facts when
they lead in that direction.’

The Fossils Falsify Evolution

Because there is an obvious conflict between the shape of some fossils
and their category assignment by evolutionists, I encourage the students
to go by the shape of their fossils, as documented by evolutionists
themselves, in making their assessments. That is the way paleoanthropologists
are supposed to do it. Then comes ‘F’ Day—Fossil Day!
The students bring their reports to class and place their fossils
on the master chart according to the evolutionist dating. As the process
takes shape, it becomes very apparent that the human fossils do not
show evolution over time. In fact, it is obvious that the fossils
themselves falsify the concept of human evolution. Regarding this
exercise, some people ask me, ‘Aren’t you taking quite a
chance? What if the exercise doesn’t always work out that way?’
In spite of the ambiguities in many of the fossils, because of the
very large number of fossils involved, the over-all testimony of the
human fossils is very clear. It always works out that way! In this
exercise, the stark reality of the human fossil record hits the student
with greater force than anything I could have said. The key in this
exercise is to study all of the relevant fossil material and to place
it all on a ‘time chart’. Besides more than 300 Neandertal
fossil individuals, this material includes more than 49 fossil individuals
in the archaic Homo sapiens category, more than 220 fossil individuals
that can properly be classified as Homo erectus, and more than 63
fossil individuals that are indistinguishable from modern Homo sapiens
and are dated by evolutionists from 30,000 years all the way back
to 4.4 million years in the past. It is no accident that evolutionist
books seldom include charts listing all of this material. For example,
one of the more recent texts (1989) on the human fossils is by University
of Chicago professor Richard G. Klein.2 In his 524-page
work, Klein has 20 different charts dealing with various aspects of
the human (hominid) fossil record. Yet, there is no way a student
could get the over-all picture. The student would simply have to accept
by faith Klein’s thesis that the fossils demonstrate human evolution.
The one chart that would most interest students—a chart showing
all of the relevant fossil material mentioned above—is not to
be found anywhere. By this type of omission, the true nature of the
human fossil record continues to be the best-kept secret in modern
paleoanthropology.